Welcome and Introduction to 11/4 Cooperative Democracy Conference

Cooperative Democracy Conference November 4, 2022

Welcome and Introduction

Good morning. My name is Harry DeRienzo, and I am pleased to welcome you to this Cooperative Democracy Conference marking the 85^th anniversary year of the Parodneck Foundation. Our foundation is an organization that has, throughout its history as a milk cooperative and a housing foundation, worked for self-determination, human dignity, mutual aid and cooperation. In a few moments you will hear from our first panel, the first of three panels presented today on work going on in our neighborhoods and how these efforts are guided by history and hold promise for our futures. Our panelists have a remarkable range of experiences and what they all share in common is a dedication to economic justice, political relevance, and human dignity. It is our goal collectively to change the current paradigm for progress defined as emanating from profit maximization to promoting a system that advances equality and fairness and achieves that end, to paraphrase the 20th Century cooperative leader and theorist, James Peter Warbasse, through means that complement the ends sought.

There are currently nearly 8 billion humans on this planet. We rule this planet. And yet, with all our technological progress we continue to degrade the very environment that hosts our existence. And as we mark progress in terms of Wall Street profits, corporate farming, genetic modification, labor alienation, mass production, agricultural uniformity, land banking, suburban sprawl, mass consumption, and individualistic pursuits of distraction, climate change, mass migrations, war and poverty continue to degrade our collective culture while threatening our very existence.

Currently, 85% of the world’s population lives on less than $30 a day; about 10% of the world’s population lives on less than $1.90 a day. Of the 8 billion of us who inhabit this planet, nearly 1 billion are malnourished daily. In terms of health care, nearly half the world’s population cannot obtain adequate health care and, like here in the United States, the cost of health care remains a major driver for impoverishing people or keeping them impoverished.

Taking a step back for a moment, there were various times in our evolutionary development when our survival as a species was in question. To cite just one of three major potential extinction events going back 195,000 years, the global climate entered a period of cold and dry conditions that lasted 70,000 years. Much of Africa experienced such extreme conditions as to make it uninhabitable. Deserts overtook vast expanses of the earth, as did expanding glaciers. Genetic studies of modern human DNA suggest that human populations fell from more than 10,000 breeding individuals to as few as 600. Homo sapiens became a highly endangered species; we came remarkably close to extinction. We survived. But why is that we were able to survive? How did we survive?

Did our remote ancestors listen to the Pleistocene equivalent of Milton Friedman tell his or her followers: “Is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed?” Or did they listen to an ancestral form of economist urging them as David Ricardo urged us that “The farmer and manufacturer can no more live without profit than the labourer can live without wages.” Or did another urge his or her fellow survivalists to eschew working together because competition, as we are told by Greek entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, is inbred. “As humans, we have evolved to compete; it is in our genes…”

All these statements may hold some truth, but is there a way to manage our greed through a greater and deeper sense of belonging, to being bound together to one another and the environments we share? Is there a way to understand profits, particularly excess profits, as forms of exploitation, an overcharge of price and/or an underpayment of compensation? Is there a way to compete and promote individual achievement but within a collaborative framework, the goals of which are greater shared social, economic, political progress, true equality, shared prosperity and social ecology?

Going back to the question of how we did survive, we survived due to individual and social evolution that met the challenges of those times. But primarily, and in direct contrast to the numerous other hominids who did go extinct, we survived due to a collective capacity for and commitment to cooperation.

But how can we believe this? We have been socialized to believe that this is pure fantasy. Critics will say, “maybe cooperation could work when there were less of us to feed, to govern, to manage, to provide for.” They will say, “look at modern history. No civilization can survive except through highly organized and centralized economic and political systems with rigid chains of command, competitive markets, profit incentives, and promotion of so-called rugged individualism.” Some of these critics will push so-called Liberal Democracy, where private property is sacrosanct, greed is its lifeblood, individual zero sum progress is the mark of social progress, and the role of government is to protect corporatism and, regardless of the cost to the average citizen, subsidize technology, privatize its use, promote profit over people, support, bolster and rescue financial markets, and promote public policy to benefit the rich. Still other critics will push for State controlled solutions. We seldom consider other possibilities.

But are there other alternatives? Can we survive and thrive with economic and political systems that are less remote, more relevant, and accessible, systems that operate within the context of thriving, functioning communities?

To answer that question, we might look to a recent book co-authored by the late David Graeber and by David Wengrow, both anthropologists. The name of the book is Dawn of Everything. The book is too comprehensive and too involved to do justice in this brief introduction, but a few references will hopefully tease your desire to learn more as well as open our minds to today’s topics.

In their book, they challenge the bias we all have, the bias we all are socialized to accept. They explain why we have difficulty accepting that change or alternative ways of organizing ourselves is possible. “The reasons why these ways of thinking remain in place, no matter how many times people point out their incoherence, is precisely because we find it so difficult to imagine history that isn’t teleological – that is, to organize history in a way which does not imply that current arrangements were somehow inevitable.”

They take great pains and exhaustive research to show how prevailing wisdom up to now is that we went in a straight line from foraging, to hunter/gathering, to agriculture, which latter phase sparked the start of the “Agricultural Revolution,” marking the start of civilization and the creation of economic surplus, leading to cities, hierarchies, dynasties and empires.  The authors shatter this conventional wisdom, with remarkable detail and engrossing stories, many of which are based upon successful Indigenous societies that were huge, complex, and organized in more egalitarian ways than we can imagine.

Throughout the book, they use evidence to demonstrate both that social evolution was not linear and that history and prehistory is replete with examples of democratic, non-hierarchical societies that were expansive in both geography and (for the time) population. According to the authors, the real question that we should be asking is why we are stuck in the current models of political economy that place emphases on economic concentration, competition, exploitation, profit, constant growth, appropriation, expansion, individual subjugation, and the lack of freedom and equality, when for most of our history we have developed complex societies that not only successfully managed other options, but have successfully employed varied forms of egalitarian social and political organization. True freedom meant personal autonomy defined not simply as the “right” to something, but the actual ability to possess or have a role in control of it.

We are here today to discuss a different model, a more humanistic social, political and economic model. We are here today to discuss Cooperative Democracy. And, perhaps, it is time once again for us to decide that for the sake of our own future, for the sake of the very planet we occupy, we must choose cooperation, mutual aid and social ecology as the path, not only for our continued success as a species, but for our very survival on this planet. Thank you for your time and attention, and for keeping an open mind as we progress through our conference today.